Okay, my experience of final fantasy is limited to the good ol NES and SNES. My friend rented this new movie thinking it would be good, and me knowing it would be bad. But I shrugged, it was a saturday night and I was ready to do anything after the long week.
There is some terrible voice acting in this movie, and the “plot” is very disjointed. There are no real character arcs. I will say I was impressed at the CGI for a direct to video release. I was sad to see a movie of sizeable budget with no concept of character development and plot. I think the terrible voice acting culminated in the end with a character yelling “Yay we win!”
They may of won, but I had lost an evening of my life.
I’m not prepared to return to Final Fantasy for a while.
It’s intended as a sequel to Final Fantasy 7, and it assumes you know the characters from that game. If you’ve never played FF7 (which, given you’ve said only NES and SNES, I presume to be the case), then no, you’re not going to be able to follow it at all. Further, it’s effectively fanwank, so unless you really liked FF7, you probably wouldn’t get into it even had you played the game.
I liked it; it’s a shallow, poor plot, but the cinematics are incredible and (for me) it’s fun to see those characters again. Definitely not a masterpiece, but enjoyable eye candy.
I have never seen the movie* or played the game, but I wanted to say that it wasn’t quite a direct to DVD release. As far as I know, they did have a few theater showings before it came out on disc.
*I did see part of it at the Sony store in DC. They had a Blu-Ray version playing on their giant TV and it looked really, really impressive.
Yeah, I agree with BayleDomon. As far as I’m concerned, the movie had three things going for it: gorgeous CGI, exciting fight scenes, and a lot of FF fan service (which I couldn’t appreciate having not played FF7). The plot, acting, etc. was lame.
But man, gorgeous CGI! Everything looked good, except of course the facial animation, which no one has nailed yet.
I have never even seen any of the Final Fantasy games (not a gamer at all), but saw the trailer for this in front of some other movie on DVD, so I bought it on a lark. I had almost zero idea what was going on when I watched it, but it is a strikingly beautiful movie. I’ve watched it a couple of times now, and am still amazed by the CGI (except for the previously mentioned facial movements).
I plalyed and enjoyed FF7, so I loved FF7: Advent Children. However, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played FF7 all the way to the end, preferably several times. It’s made for the fans. Even if there was a summary of the game story available, I don’t think that it would be very interesting to someone who hadn’t played the game and thrown the controller across the room several times.
Though I have to say that the movie made me cringe. Perhaps not animation wise, but pretty much everything else. And I did play the game a couple of times and liked it.
Ditto on the previous replies, it’s basically eye candy and fanservice.
If you don’t know anything about the plot or characters of the game, don’t expect to understand anything, because they don’t explain any of it. They pretty much presume you know everything already. It doesn’t have character development, because the characters are already developed. Anyone expecting more is probably going to be disappointed.
The American voice acting blows halfway to China in a wooden rowboat, which is why I watch it subtitled. I could only stand about the first ten minutes before switching over from the dubbed to the subtitled version.
They sold a 300$ collector’s edition of it in Japan that sold out in pre-order status. People are nuts over FF7.
I never really enjoyed FF7 as a whole, but I enjoyed Advent Children for what it was, because it was a pretty piece of CGI, and I like the shiny.